When his father, Li Housheng, went to the market to sell bamboo baskets, Zhao Laosan, who was used to being a bully in the village, kicked the stall over in public. The bamboo baskets rolled into the mud. Others gathered around to laugh, but his father just lowered his head and picked them up one by one.
The young Li Jinxi couldn't understand at that time why his father didn't even dare to say a harsh word even though he was very strong. It was not until he was 30 years old that when he looked back on the past, those mountain roads, markets, cold lunch boxes, old account books and a large scale flashed through his mind, and he slowly understood: the tolerance of the poor is not because they are born spineless, but because they drag the family behind them to survive.
From Nanling Village to Qingshi Town, from the classroom in the town to the market in the county town, Li Jinxi relied on reading to gain popularity, making money from mountain goods, relying on an account to support the Li family, and also supported a road out of the mountains.
Many years later, he discovered that the road he had traveled for half his life had long been written together with the fate of thousands of rural people into a volume of old stories in Nanling deep in the mountains and rivers.
